Defining Torture Down (For America, Natch)

The AP:

Schmidt said that to get ["20th hijacker" Mohamed al-Qahtani] to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

The AP quotes Schmidt...

Still, he said, "No torture occurred."

"Still?" "He said?" The writing in cast in terms of doubting his statement. Is this torture?

If this is torture, what to make of Saddam's acid-shower rooms? What are they?Double-secret super-torture?

Cliffs of Insanity notes that after breathlessly reporting horrid allegations of men forced to wear thongs on their heads (PS, I'm not weird, but I gotta say, doing that just makes me feel sexy), the AP finally buries the real lead-- that only three violations of protocols were discovered at Guantanamo.

The New Editor also weighs in, quoting the same piece:

"It is clear from the report that detainee mistreatment was not simply the product of a few rogue miltiary (sic) police in a night shift," said Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee. Bush administration officials have sought to portray the excesses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as just that.

Bear in mind these people -- anti-war Democratic politicians and the anti-war Democratic media Spirit Squad -- downplayed Saddam's vicious torture and state-supported rape, so as not to help the Administration in making its case for war.

Having done so, it appears particularly egregious now that they trump bras on the head as "torture" or even "mistreatment."

There's a reason the allegation of being anti-American is so often directed, overtly or subtly, at the liberal opposition (both the official political one and the semi-official public-relations office known as the MSM). It's due to this longtime practice of minimizing the savagery of America's enemies while trumpeting the barely-worth-mentioning "mistreatment" inflicted by America.

Again, their response to this is always: "But we want to America to be better." Who doesn't? But it's hard to square their claimed love of America with their constant adversarial position against her. Generally the objection of your affection is seen and a described in a positive light, not a viciously distorted negative one.

posted by Ace at 06:46 PM

| Access Comments